Researcher portrait: Bruno Debaenst

Panta Rhei. Everything flows, like the Fyris River. This applies to my academic career and my research as well. In my case, it has been a winding and changing journey, with many unexpected turns. When I started as a history student in Ghent in 1995, I could never have dreamed of becoming a lecturer in legal history in Uppsala. Yet, that is exactly what I am today, says Bruno Debaenst, whose current research reflects all the steps in this journey of his.

In 2021, for instance, he published a book chapter ("From pro Deo to pro Pecunia. An Institutional History of Legal Aid in Belgium") on the history of legal aid in Belgium - a relic from the time when he was a lawyer (2003–2008).

His specialty as a legal historian is the history of Belgian social law; Bruno's dissertation (2006–2010) focused on the juridification of workplace accidents during the 19th century in Belgium. Recently, he gave a lecture within this area on Lohngerechtigkeit (wage justice) in Belgium, at a conference in Giessen in May 2023, and a lecture on the history of labor courts in Belgium, at a conference in Ghent in December 2023.

• However, I have a much broader interest. For example, I have recently published about Belgian legal culture ("An Introduction to Belgian Legal Culture," 2020 & 2023), about conflict resolution in Belgium (2021), about the discovery of plagiarism by a Flemish legal scholar in the 16th century (2023 & 2024), and about the role of languages in the Belgian nation-building ("The Tower of Babelgium: The Never-ending Belgian Nation-building," 2023).

• I have also conducted research on the private international organizations that preceded the International Labour Organization (ILO), resulting in four articles and book chapters (two in 2020 and two in 2023). Additionally, I have been involved in an international research collaboration stemming from long-standing cooperation with colleagues from the Centre d’histoire judiciaire in Lille, France.

Since Bruno started working in Sweden, he has also taken an interest in Swedish legal history. Among other things, he has written about the subject of legal history in Uppsala in "In the Footsteps of Linnaeus: Carl Gustaf Spangenberg on the Crossroad of Context and Tradition" (2019), and now he is also conducting further research on Swedish legal history. This year, his first Swedish article will be published in "De Lege," focusing on the history of RF74 (“Du Gamla, du Nya. 1974 års regeringsformen ur ett rättshistoriskt perspektiv”).

Furthermore, Bruno is very interested in the Fourth (Digital) Industrial Revolution, which he tries to connect with the earlier industrial revolutions. For example, he wrote an article in De Lege in 2021 – which was a special issue on "Law, AI, and Digitalisation," - where he examined the digital revolution from a legal-historical perspective. In connection with this, he also initiated writing a research project on "Law and the Industrial Revolutions in Sweden."

For Bruno, research and teaching are intertwined. His book chapter "The Intangible Public Opinion as Safeguard of the Rechtsstaat: A Legal Historical Analysis," in an anthology on the challenges of the rule of law in 2024, evolved from his advanced course "Historical Trials." For some years now, he has also included a lecture on "Legal Futurology" in the course "Comparative Legal History and General Jurisprudence," and he has written an article on this topic that he hopes to publish next year in the journal Rechtskultur.

• Another example of the intertwining of research and teaching is my popular doctoral course "Legal History for PhD students in law," which I have offered three times already (2019, 2021, and 2023), with numerous participants from across the Nordic region. Since 2020, I have also served as a supervisor for several completed and ongoing master theses in legal history. I see this as "research by proxy," where I explore some aspect of legal history together with the student. Since 2018, I have also read and assessed approximately 2,000 student papers in the subject, where each paper represents a small research endeavor, primarily within Swedish legal history. It is somewhat compulsory reading, but also very instructive and inspiring!